Rep. Deborah Ross, D-N.C., on Tuesday said she expects her state’s Supreme Court to reject legal challenges to Republican plans to redraw its congressional districts — and for the US Supreme Court to not weigh in before the midterm elections.
North Carolina state legislators last week approved a new congressional map designed to boost Republicans’ chances of picking up a House seat, which the state’s GOP governor does not have the ability to veto. It’s part of what has become a nationwide arms race between the parties to redraw House district lines, with upwards of a half-dozen states either pursuing or discussing rare mid-decade redistricting.
“I don’t think any legal challenge in our state Supreme Court will be successful because our state Supreme Court has become … so highly partisan, and is really just an echo chamber for our general assembly,” Ross said at Semafor’s Navigating Regulatory Waves event. “I mean, the senator pro tem’s son is on the Supreme Court, you know? I mean, this is just very incestuous.”
Ross added that she is more hopeful about the challenges’ odds before the US Supreme Court — specifically, that it “will not fully gut Section Two of the Voting Rights Act.”
“But I don’t think it will be resolved in time for this next election, and that is just really criminal,” Ross said. “I mean, people are being disenfranchised.”
Ross said she believes “an African American, or somebody that the African American community picked as their choice, could win” in Republican Rep. Greg Murphy’s district: “It’s got medical centers, more history of racial cooperation — and even though it’s a Republican district in a wave year, that could be interesting.”